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Category Archives for "Networking"

IBM launches a software-defined storage server for AI

IBM has added a new member to its Spectrum Scale Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) portfolio that featuers a faster controller CPU and more throughput and that is designed  to work with Nvidia’s DGX dense compute servers for AI training.The new ESS 3500 is a 2U design with 24 drive bays and a maximum raw capacity of 368TB. But it can achieve up to 1PB through LZ4 compression, a first for the series that earlier ESS versions do not have. The ESS 3500 can achieve up to 91GB/s of throughput performance, better than the 80GB/s of the older models.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM launches a software-defined storage server for AI

IBM has added a new member to its Spectrum Scale Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) portfolio that featuers a faster controller CPU and more throughput and that is designed  to work with Nvidia’s DGX dense compute servers for AI training.The new ESS 3500 is a 2U design with 24 drive bays and a maximum raw capacity of 368TB. But it can achieve up to 1PB through LZ4 compression, a first for the series that earlier ESS versions do not have. The ESS 3500 can achieve up to 91GB/s of throughput performance, better than the 80GB/s of the older models.To read this article in full, please click here

Weekend Reads 052022


The steepening trajectory towards event-driven and real-time API architecture is imminent.


The idea of this declaration has a lot to do with the “Past of the Internet.” When the Internet was developing in the 1980s and 1990s, it was seen primarily as a tool that would expand individual freedoms worldwide, strengthen democracy, and create prosperity through innovation and economic progress.


I’m not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud – and this movement to the cloud means we’re using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past.


Among the many disruptions facing modern communication service providers (CSPs), one of the biggest is the growing role of data centers (DCs) in their business.


A bargain-basement, $5 price tag on a 3-year-old remote access Trojan (RAT) has concerned some security researchers, who see the move as signs of a possible race to the bottom in terms of pricing — or that new, disrupting developers are entering the cybercriminal market.


Researchers are marveling at the scope and magnitude of a vulnerability that hackers are actively exploiting to take full control of network devices that run on some of the world’s biggest Continue reading

Canada bans Huawei, ZTE in 5G networks

Canada is the latest country to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment from use in the telecommunications field generally and 5G networks in particular, as the government's announcement this week detailed its intention to introduce a broad, new telecom security framework.Canadian telecom companies are to be barred officially from buying new Huawei or ZTE equipment as of September of this year, according to the government's policy statement Thursday. Canada will also mandate the removal of all Huawei and ZTE gear from 5G networks by June 28, 2024, as well as the removal of all those companies' 4G/LTE equipment by the end of 2027.This means that, like the US, Canada's move to ban certain Chinese networking gear extends to equipment already in use, so that telecom companies that have bought such gear will need to replace it. It's unclear from the announcement whether Canada will follow the US' lead in providing financial assistance to companies working to rid their networks of banned equipment, although the statement did say that the government plans to "engage with industry" in order to make sure that logistical considerations for gear replacement are taken into account.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel to build $700M sustainability-focused R&D lab

Intel has announced its intention to invest $700 million in a new research and development lab focused on developing sustainable data center technologies, such as immersion cooling, water usage effectiveness, and heat recapture and reuse.The 200,000-square-foot lab will be located at Intel’s Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. Construction will begin this year, with an estimated opening date of late 2023. To read this article in full, please click here

Intel to build $700M sustainability-focused R&D lab

Intel has announced its intention to invest $700 million in a new research and development lab focused on developing sustainable data center technologies, such as immersion cooling, water usage effectiveness, and heat recapture and reuse.The 200,000-square-foot lab will be located at Intel’s Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. Construction will begin this year, with an estimated opening date of late 2023. To read this article in full, please click here

What is Nmap and why do you need it on your network?

Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free and open source tool used for vulnerability checking, port scanning and, of course, network mapping. Despite being created back in 1997, Nmap remains the gold standard against which all other similar tools, either commercial or open source, are judged.Nmap has maintained its preeminence because of the large community of developers and coders who help to maintain and update it. The Nmap community reports that the tool, which anyone can get for free, is downloaded several thousand times every week.To read this article in full, please click here

What is Nmap and why do you need it on your network?

Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free and open source tool used for vulnerability checking, port scanning and, of course, network mapping. Despite being created back in 1997, Nmap remains the gold standard against which all other similar tools, either commercial or open source, are judged.Nmap has maintained its preeminence because of the large community of developers and coders who help to maintain and update it. The Nmap community reports that the tool, which anyone can get for free, is downloaded several thousand times every week.To read this article in full, please click here

Wendy Komadina: No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

Wendy Komadina: No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.
Wendy Komadina: No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

I joined Cloudflare in March to lead Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). In the last month I’ve been asked many times: “Why Cloudflare?” I’ll be honest, I’ve had opportunities to join other technology companies, but no other organization excited me more than Cloudflare. So I jumped. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for the opportunity to build a strong partner ecosystem for APJC.

Wendy Komadina: No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

When I considered joining Cloudflare, I recall consistently reading the message around “Helping to Build a Better Internet”. At first those words didn’t connect with me, but they sounded like an important mission.

I did my research and read analyst reports to learn about Cloudflare's market position, and then it dawned on me, Cloudflare is leading a transformation. Taking traditional on-premise networking and security hardware and building a transformational cloud-based solution, so customers don’t need to worry about which company supplied their kit. I was excited to learn that Cloudflare customers can simply access the vast global network that has been designed to make everything that customers connect to on the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. So hasn’t this been done before? For compute and storage that transformation is almost Continue reading

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

Background

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

We use Prometheus as our core monitoring system. We’ve been heavy Prometheus users since 2017 when we migrated off our previous monitoring system which used a customized Nagios setup. Despite growing our infrastructure a lot, adding tons of new products and learning some hard lessons about operating Prometheus at scale, our original architecture of Prometheus (see Monitoring Cloudflare's Planet-Scale Edge Network with Prometheus for an in depth walk through) remains virtually unchanged, proving that Prometheus is a solid foundation for building observability into your services.

One of the key responsibilities of Prometheus is to alert us when something goes wrong and in this blog post we’ll talk about how we make those alerts more reliable - and we’ll introduce an open source tool we’ve developed to help us with that, and share how you can use it too. If you’re not familiar with Prometheus you might want to start by watching this video to better understand the topic we’ll be covering here.

Prometheus works by collecting metrics from our services and storing those metrics inside its database, called TSDB. We can then query these metrics using Prometheus query language called PromQL using ad-hoc queries (for example to power Grafana Continue reading

Mitigating controls for cloud-native applications: Why you need them and how Calico Cloud can help

Fixing vulnerabilities can be hard—especially so for cloud-native applications. Let’s take a deeper look at why this is, and how mitigating controls can help secure your cloud-native applications.

Vulnerabilities are like earthquakes—its best to be prepared

The trials and tribulations of Log4j are now safely in our rearview mirror. Most of us responsible for operating a container platform like Kubernetes have navigated through the remediation efforts and disaster has been averted.

But it was a wake-up call for many, and at the very least a healthy reminder for all of us. There have been many infamous vulnerabilities before Log4j, and much like living in an area of the world where earthquakes can strike at any moment, much can be learned from the big ones that came before.

When Heartbleed was publicly disclosed in 2014 it sent shockwaves around the world. It was a critical vulnerability in the ubiquitous OpenSSL library—a cryptographic software library that is used to implement the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. Most of the web relies on TLS to secure communication between clients and servers, and the vulnerability came about through a simple bug that resulted in improper input validation for heartbeats.

The bug existed in OpenSSL Continue reading

Addressing the Challenges of Real-Time Data Sharing

While conventional data warehouses and data lakes have become common practice for analytics workloads, they don’t solve the broader enterprise problems of sharing real-time operational data among departments or across companies. This three-part series explores the challenges and solutions that arise when integrating business data across different applications, clouds and organizations in a modern IT stack. Part 1 highlights the challenges of real-time data sharing, discusses operational vs. analytical data, and legacy solutions and their limitations. Part 2 defines the real-time data mesh and discusses the key tenets for incorporating them into modern IT stacks. Part 3 focuses on what’s needed to effectively evaluate real-time data-sharing solutions. Canyon Spanning — The Foundational IT Challenge Tim Wagner Tim is the inventor of AWS Lambda and a former general manager of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway services. He has also served as vice president of engineering at Coinbase, where he managed design, security and product management teams. Tim co-founded Vendia to help organizations of all sizes share data more effectively across clouds and companies, and he serves as its CEO. One of the most enduring and foundational challenges for IT professionals regardless of their organization’s size or industry is getting data Continue reading

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version
Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

There’s only one song contest that is more than six decades old and not only presents many new songs (ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Domenico Modugno shined there), but also has a global stage that involves 40 countries — performers represent those countries and the public votes. The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Turin, Italy, had two semi-finals (May 10 and 12) and a final (May 14), all of them with highlights, including Ukraine’s victory. The Internet was impacted in more than one way, from whole countries to the fan and official broadcasters sites, but also video platforms.

On our Eurovision dedicated page, it was possible to see the level of Internet traffic in the 40 participant countries, and we tweeted some highlights during the final.

First, some technicalities. The baseline for the values we use in the following charts Continue reading

NSX-T 3.2.1: Rolling Upgrade for NSX Management Plane

VMware NSX 3.2.1 continues to deliver enhancements for improving the VMware NSX upgrade process, including rolling upgrades that shorten upgrade maintenance windows and improved visibility into the NSX upgrade progress.

During the upgrade, the management plane will always be available, normal operation, ie, API calls, configuration changes, adding and removing Transport Nodes can be performed. If there’s an issue that occurred during the upgrade, users can roll back to the previous release without deploying a new NSX cluster and restoring the backup. The rolling upgrade feature applies to only the NSX Manager upgrade portion of the upgrade. In other words, the sequence of the NSX components upgrade remains in the following order: NSX Upgrade Coordinator upgrade, NSX Edge upgrade, Host upgrade, then the NSX Manager upgrade.

How Rolling Upgrade works

Prior to NSX 3.2.1 release, we upgrade all the manager nodes in the management cluster simultaneously. The advantage of the parallel upgrade is that it takes less time to upgrade the management plane. The tradeoff is that the management plane will not be available for a period during the upgrade process. With the rolling upgrade, the manager nodes will be upgraded sequentially. During the management upgrade Continue reading

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